About the author: Gary Y. Okihiro is a professor of international and public affairs and director of the Asian American Studies Program at Columbia University. He is author and editor of several books in ethnic studies, including In Resistance: Studies in African Caribbean, and Afro-American History and Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture.
2000 0-7734-7839-6 This volume is a pre-colonial economic history drawn from field research that benefits from the debates within southern African history arising from the literatures of dependency, peasantization, and articulation of the 1980s and from the more recent critique by the social and cultural historians of the 1990s. It is an excavation of historical knowledge and production undertaken two decades after the initial fieldwork and theoretical readings that inform this study, and is thus not only an exemplar of the intellectual debates of the 1970s, but an important critique of that period and its projects and a reminder of the distinction among varieties of history that emanate from their historical and social locations.